In-depth with Android Wear, Google’s quantum leap of a smartwatch OS

We take a look at how Android Wear works, and even manage to break some stuff.

Yesterday, Google announced Android Wear, its wearable device platform for smartwatches. Android Wear is a shrunken-down, watch-going version of KitKat that looks poised to take over the wearables market. After poring over tons of websites and digging around in the emulator, we've scraped together just about all the information that's out there, so if you want to know what the future of smartwatches looks like, read on.

This is the home screen of Android Wear. At the top is a very faint "G" button. When pressed, the device starts listening for voice commands. If buttons aren't really your thing, an "OK Google" hotword will work, too. Below the button is a notification showing the time and weather. Tapping on the weather will expand it, and swiping left will open the extended forecast. Swiping up will show more notifications, one at a time.

Every UI element in Android Wear seems to work in this manner. Tapping on the center of the screen will expand whatever is on it; swiping horizontally will do something related to the current screen, either showing options or more details; and swiping up or down will go to other areas. If you're off in a menu, you don't have to swipe back to center in order to swipe up, either—just swipe up or down from anywhere in the menu to go to the next notification.

These screengrabs all seem to be Google Now. Prior to the unveiling of Android Wear, rumors mostly pointed to heavy Google Now integration, and it looks like Google has delivered. The first screenshot is actually the home screen again, which you can tell from the time and Google button. Google Now is showing a notification on the home screen, and the notification is replacing the home screen background with a map. Notifications will often replace the background with a picture relevant to the latest notification, usually something like a profile picture. In fact, we're not even sure there is a default home screen background. The background picture always seems to be provided by the current notification, even if it's something passive like the weather. On the emulator, when there is no notification, the screen is just black. Google Now will presumably provide the "default" background with a weather picture in the final version.

Voice input is pretty much the only option for a smartwatch, so naturally Android Wear has that built in. This means that things like instant messages, texts, and e-mails can be replied to as long as you are willing to speak your response. In the first picture, we have a Hangouts message on the home screen. Saying "reply" will start the voice recognizer, which, like Google Glass, will transcribe your speech and auto-send the message unless you stop it. A blue line travels around the circumference of the watch face to give you time to cancel the message. This part of the Android Wear interface is basically "Google Glass with color." Indeed, Android Wear seems like it has been heavily influenced by Google Glass.

Google being Google, search is, of course, part of the equation. There's Voice Search, and it's the usual Knowledge Graph-powered answer service that runs on a phone right now. Knowledge Graph will let you ask Google direct questions like "how high is the Empire State Building?" and will return a direct answer, usually through a TTS engine. This isn't a straight rip of the Web interface; Android Wear is doing a good amount of reformatting for the tiny display.

Enlarge/ A Navigation notification, activity recognition, and song recognition.

The first image is a Google Maps Mass Transit Navigation in progress—the user is riding on a bus, and it's telling him to get off in four stops. The cool thing about this is that it's taking over the home screen to give this information. When you actively have navigation turned on, that's obviously the most important thing you're doing at the moment, so having that function take over the home screen is a great idea.

The home screen seems to ambiently surface Google Now-style notifications all the time. To see just how crazy this is going to get, check out the second picture, where Android Wear detects that the user is dancing and offers to perform music recognition. That might sound like sci-fi, but Google actually added "Activity Recognition" to Android at Google I/O 2013. The current detected states are driving, biking, walking/running, and standing still, and all that information came only from a phone in a pocket. A wrist-mounted device is privy to a much greater range of movement, and the video suggests that Google has taken advantage of this fact and whipped up some dance recognition software. Doing this correctly—showing the right information at the right time—is going to be a big challenge for Android Wear. If the notifications are wrong, Wear will be really annoying. The best way to counter this is fine-grained user control over notifications, which we sincerely hope Google offers. Google mentioned vibrating the watch for only important notifications, which should help. Occasionally you'll look at your watch to check something and the home screen will be some kind of Google Now card, passively offering to help you do something. The third picture is the aftermath of the music recognition, which shows some album art.

Voice Search has a cool little help screen that Google has thoughtfully chosen to show off in a GIF. After tapping on the Google button on the home screen, you can drag up to see voice command hints. Most of these are buried in the emulator code, but not all of them. After some disassembly, we found text for taking a note, setting a reminder or alarm, sending a text or e-mail, navigating with Google Maps, starting a Hangout, playing music, showing your calendar events, counting steps, opening the settings, and enabling airplane mode. These functions all appear to be accessed from this screen. The other interesting thing about this GIF is that even though it doesn't invoke the menu by swiping left, it closes by swiping right. Swiping right when not in a horizontal menu seems to be used as a back button.

Ron Amadeo / Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work.